Behemoth (9 page)

“Shit,” says one of the modelers. “Not
again
.”

It takes Clarke a moment to realize that he's not reacting to Seger's words, but to something on the workstation screen. She leans forward, catches sight of the display through the copse of personnel: a volumetric model of the Atlantic basin. Luminous contrails wind through its depths like many-headed snakes, bifurcating and converging over continental shelves and mountain ranges. Currents and gyres and deep-water circulation iconized in shades of green and red: the ocean's own rivers. And superimposed over the entire display, a churlish summary:

FAILURE TO CONVERGE. CONFIDENCE LIMITS EXCEEDED.

FURTHER PREDICTIONS UNRELIABLE.

“Bring down the Labrador Current a bit more,” one of the modelers suggests.

“Any more and it'll shut down completely,” another one says.

“So how do you know that isn't exactly what happened?”

“When the Gulf Stream—”

“Just
try
it, will you?”

The Atlantic clears and resets.

Rowan turns from her troops and fixes Seger. “Suppose they can't figure it out?”

“Maybe it was down here all along. Maybe we just missed it.” Seger shakes her head, as if skeptical of her own suggestion. “We
were
in something of a hurry.”

“Not that much hurry. We checked every vent within a thousand kilometers before we settled on this site, did we not?”

“Somebody did,” Seger says tiredly.

“I saw the results. They were comprehensive.” Rowan seems almost less disturbed by
β
ehemoth's appearance than by the thought that the surveys might have been off. “And certainly none of the surveys since have shown anything…” She breaks off, struck by some sudden thought. “They haven't, have they? Lenie?”

“No,” Clarke says. “Nothing.”

“Right. So, five years ago this whole area was clean. The whole abyssal Atlantic was clean, as far as we know. And how long can
β
ehemoth survive in cold seawater before it shrivels up like a prune and dies?”

“A week or two,” Seger recites. “A month max.”

“And how long would it take to get here via deep circulation?”

“Decades. Centuries.” Seger sighs. “We know all this, Pat. Obviously, something's changed.”

“Thanks for that insight, Jerry. What might that something be?”

“Christ, what do you want from me? I'm not an oceanographer.” Seger waves an exasperated hand at the modelers. “Ask
them
. Jason's been running that model for—”

“Semen-sucking-motherfucking
stumpfucker
!” Jason snarls at the screen. The screen snarls back:

FAILURE TO CONVERGE. CONFIDENCE LIMITS EXCEEDED.

FURTHER PREDICTIONS UNRELIABLE.

Rowan closes her eyes and starts again. “Would it be able to survive in the euphotic zone, at least? It's warmer up there, even in winter. Could our recon parties have picked it up and brought it back?”

“Then it would be showing up here, not way over at Impossible Lake.”

“But it shouldn't be showing
anywh
—”

“What about fish?” Lubin says suddenly.

Rowan looks at him. “What?”

“
β
ehemoth can survive indefinitely inside a host, correct? Less osmotic stress. That's why they infect fish in the first place. Perhaps they hitched a ride.”

“Abyssal fish don't disperse,” Seger says. “They just hang around the vents.”

“Are the larvae planktonic?”

“Still wouldn't work. Not over these kinds of distances, anyway.”

“With all due respect,” Lubin remarks, “you're a medical doctor. Maybe we should ask someone with
relevant
expertise.”

It's a jab, of course. When the corpses were assigning professional berths on the ark, ichthyologists didn't even make the long list. But Seger only shakes her head impatiently. “They'd tell you the same thing.”

“How do you know?” There's an odd curiosity in Rowan's voice.

“Because
β
ehemoth was trapped in a few hot vents for most of Earth's history. If it had been able to disperse inside plankton, why wait until now to take over the world? It would have done it a few hundred million years ago.”

Something changes in Patricia Rowan. Clarke can't quite put her finger on it. Maybe it's some subtle shift in the other woman's posture. Or perhaps Rowan's ConTacts have brightened, as if the intel twinkling across her eyes has slipped into fast-forward.

“Pat?” Clarke asks.

But suddenly Seger's coming out of her chair like it was on fire, spurred by a signal coming over her earbud. She taps her watch to bring it online: “I'm on my way. Stall them.”

She turns to Lubin and Clarke. “If you really want to help, come with me.”

“What's the problem?” Lubin asks.

Seger's already halfway across the cave. “More slow learners. They're about to kill your friend.”

CAVALRY

T
HERE
are lines drawn everywhere in Atlantis, four-centimeter gaps that circumscribe whole corridors as if someone had chainsawed through the bulkheads at regular intervals. The gaps are flagged by cautionary bands of diagonal striping to either side, and if you stand astride one of them and look up to where it passes overhead, you'll see why: each contains a dropgate, poised to guillotine down in the event of a hull breach. They're such convenient and ubiquitous boundaries that parties in opposition have always tended to use them as lines in the sand.

Parties like the half-dozen corpses hanging back at the junction, too scared or too smart to get involved. Parties like Hannuk Yeager, dancing restlessly on the far side of the striped line, keeping them all at bay fifteen meters upwind of the infirmary.

Lubin shoulders through the chickenshit corpses, Clarke hobbling in his wake. Yeager bares his teeth in greeting: “Party's four doors down on the left!” His capped eyes narrow at their corpse escorts.

Clarke and Lubin pass. Seger tries to follow; Yeager catches her around the throat and holds her there, squirming. “Invitation only.”

“You don't—” Yeager clenches; Seger's voice chokes down to a whisper. “You want … Gene to die…?”

“Sounds like a
threat,
” Yeager growls.

“I'm his
doctor
!”

“Let her go,” Clarke tells him. “We might need her.”

Yeager doesn't budge.

Oh shit,
Clarke thinks.
Is he primed?

Yeager's got a mutation: too much monoamine oxidase in his blood. It breaks down the brain chemicals that keep people on an even keel. The authorities tweaked him to compensate, back in the days when they could get away with such things, but he learned to get around it somehow. Sometimes he deliberately strings himself so tight that a sideways glance can send him off the deep end. It gets him off. When that happens, it doesn't matter all that much whether you're friend or foe. Times like that, even Lubin takes him seriously.

Lubin's taking him seriously now. “Let her past, Han.” His voice is calm and even, his posture relaxed.

From down the corridor, a groan. The sound of something breaking.

Yeager snorts and tosses Seger aside. The woman staggers coughing against the wall.

“You too,” Lubin says to Rowan, who's still discreetly behind the striped line. To Yeager: “If it's okay with you, of course.”

“Shit, I don't give a fuck.” Yeager's fingers clench and unclench as if electrified.

Lubin nods. “You go on,” he says casually to Clarke. “I'll help Han hold the fort.”

It's Nolan, of course. Clarke can hear her snarling as she nears the medbay: “Ah, the little fuckhead's gone and shit himself…”

She squeezes through the hatch. The sour stench of fear and feces hits her in the face. Nolan, yes. And she's got Creasy backing her up. Klein's been thrown into the corner, broken and bleeding. Maybe he tried to get in the way. Maybe Nolan just wanted him to.

Gene Erickson's awake at last, crouching on the table like a caged animal. His splayed fingers push against the isolation membrane and it just
stretches,
like impossibly thin latex. The farther he pushes, the harder it pulls; his arm isn't quite extended but the membrane's tight as it's going to go, a mass of oily indestructible rainbows swirling along lines of resistable force.

“Fuck,”
he growls, sinking back.

Nolan squats down and cocks her head, birdlike, a few centimeters from Klein's bloody face. “Let him out, sweetie.”

Klein drools blood and spit. “I
told
you, he's—”

“Get away from him!”
Seger pushes into the compartment as though the past five years—as though the past five
minutes
—never happened. She barely gets her hand on Nolan's shoulder before Creasy slams her into a bulkhead.

Nolan brushes imaginary contaminants from the place where Seger touched her. “Don't damage the head,” she tells Creasy. “Could be a password in there.”

“Everybody.” Rowan, at least, is smart enough to stay in the corridor. “Just. Calm. Down.”

Nolan snorts, shaking her head. “Or
what,
stumpfuck? Are you going to
call security
? Are you going to have us
ejected from the premises
?”

Creasy's white eyes regard Seger from mere centimeters away, a promise of empty and mindless violence set above a grinning bulldozer jaw. Creasy, it is said, has a way with women. Not that he's ever fucked with Clarke. Not that anyone does, as a rule.

Rowan looks through the open hatch, her expression calm and self-assured. Clarke sees the plea hidden behind the confident facade. For a moment, she considers ignoring it. Her leg tingles maddeningly. At her elbow Creasy makes kissy-kissy noises at Seger, his hand vised around the doctor's jaw.

Clarke ignores him. “What's the deal, Grace?”

Nolan smiles harshly. “We managed to wake him up, but Normy here”—an absent punch at Klein's head—“put some kind of password on the table. We can't dial down the membrane.”

Clarke turns to Erickson. “How you feeling?”

“They did something to me.” He coughs. “When I was in coma.”

“Yes we did. We saved his—” Creasy bumps Seger's head against the bulkhead. Seger shuts up.

Clarke keeps her eyes on Erickson. “Can you move without spilling your intestines all over?”

He twists clumsily around to show off his abdomen; the membrane stretches against his head and shoulder like an amniotic sac. “Miracles of modern medicine,” he tells her, flopping onto his back. Sure enough, his insides have all been packed back where they belong. Fresh pink scars along his abs complement the older ones on his thorax.

Jerenice Seger looks very much as if she wants to say something. Dale Creasy looks very much as if he wants her to try.

“Let her talk,” Clarke tells him. He loosens his grip just slightly; Seger looks at Clarke and keeps her mouth shut.

“So what's the story?” Clarke prompts. “Looks like you glued him back together okay. It's been almost three days.”

“Three days,” Seger repeats. Her voice is squeezed thin and reedy under Creasy's grip. “He was almost disemboweled, and you think
three days
is enough time to recover.”

In fact, Clarke's sure of it. She's seen torn and broken bodies before; she's seen multiarmed robots reassemble them, lay fine electrical webbing into their wounds to crank healing up to a rate that would be miraculous if it weren't so routine. Three days is more than enough time to drag yourself back outside, seams still oozing maybe but strong enough, strong enough; and once you're weightless again, and sheltered by the endless black womb of the abyss, you've got all the time in the world to recover.

It's something the drybacks have never been able to grasp: what keeps you weak is the
gravity
.

“Does he need more surgery?” she asks.

“He will, if he isn't careful.”

“Answer the fucking question,” Nolan snarls.

Seger glances at Clarke, evidently finds no comfort there. “What he needs is time to recover, and coma will cut that by two thirds. If he wants to get out of here quickly, that's his best option.”

“You're keeping him here against his will,” Nolan says.

“Why—” Rowan begins from the corridor.

Nolan wheels on her. “You shut the fuck up
right now
.”

Rowan calmly pushes her luck. “
Why
would we want to keep him here if it weren't medically necessary?”

“He could rest up in his own hab,” Clarke says. “Outside, even.”

Seger shakes her head. “He's running a significant fever—Lenie, just
look
at him!”

She's got a point. Erickson's flat on his back, apparently exhausted. A sheen of perspiration slicks his skin, almost lost behind the more conspicuous glistening of the membrane.

“A fever,” Clarke repeats. “Not from the operation?”

“No. Some kind of opportunistic infection.”

“From what?”

“He was mauled by a wild animal,” Seger points out, exasperated. “There's no end to the kind of things you can pick up from something as simple as a bite, and he was nearly
eviscerated
. It would be almost inconceivable if there
weren't
complications.”

“Hear that, Gene?” Clarke says. “You've got fish rabies or something.”

“Fuckin' A,” he says, staring at the ceiling.

“So it's your call. Want to stay here, let 'em fix you? Or trust to drugs and take your chances?”